Scientific disciplines, as we know them, are a fairly recent invention. As late as the 18th century, both amateur and professional scientists let their intellect range unfettered. The great Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci explored architecture, engineering, geology, botany and more. He is credited with inventing the helicopter, a diving suit and painting the Mona Lisa.

Chemist Emily Balskus of Harvard University is out to expose the crimes and misdemeanors of microbes living in the human gut. She’s shown, for example, how a common gut bacterium interferes with a heart failure treatment: The microbe breaks down the medication before the drug can do its job.

Ibrahim Cissé expected to join his father’s law firm one day. “There were no scientists where I grew up in Niger,” says the MIT biophysicist. “I certainly didn’t know [science] was a profession one could do.”

But Cissé’s parents had a telling clue about their young son’s eventual career path: a door sign he made that read “Laboratoire de...

Yet the planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson is exploring a very different kind of built environment: the strange structures created by volcanoes on worlds across the solar system, from Earth to Mars to the moon.

Think of tissues as mosh pits of cells. The cells may not be able to crowd surf, but they can jam.

Specifically, cells can undergo a jamming transition, a physical role change that was previously known to occur only among foams, sand and other nonliving materials. It’s one of the ways that physicist Lisa Manning has shown how...

Joaquín Rodríguez-López was jolted into the world of electrochemistry. When he realized in college that he could hook up a machine to some wires and transform chemicals into energy, he was “completely sold,” he says.

The world is awash in data, and Anshumali Shrivastava may save us from drowning in it.

Every day, over 1 billion photos are posted online. In a single second, the Large Hadron Collider can churn out a million gigabytes of observations. Big data is ballooning faster than current computer programs can analyze it.